I’ve often said that if our second child were a boy, he would have gone nameless.

Blame it on our preferences. My husband and I planned to source family names for our children, without thinking about the imbalance. We have tons of women in our family, with a rich list of interesting names. The pool of masculine names is much smaller, and repeats, again and again, over the generations. Naming a second – or third or fourth – son would have required a willingness to reinvent some antiques and reconsider a few imports.

EricChristianOlsen, Kate Levering, Fergie and Josh Duhamel have all brought home new sons. The parents have something in common besides making headlines. Their naming style might be called modern classic.

This category is different. These are names that would have been considered unusual – maybe even strange – just a few decades back. But today, they’re mainstream, go-to appellations.

Call them Goldilocks names. There are buttoned-down classics like James and George, and daring never-heard-before ones like Pilot and Zuma. Goldilocks choices are at neither extreme. They’re just right, falling into the wide middle: very wearable, but probably not your grandpa’s name. Sure, they might be this generation’s Larry and Jerry, Ronald and Keith. But they make for great choices in 2013.

Winter baby names are, quite literally, cool. While summer names can be sultry, spring names fresh and autumn names colorful, the increasingly trendy wintry names have an image that is crisp and clear, white and snowy. Some of these cold-climate names are fairly obvious—Winter being the extreme example– while others are a bit more subtle, ranging from calendar months to ski resorts to weather conditions to international twists.

You’re considering the name Jack. You like it because it’s less formal than John, less trendy than Jackson. It has a nickname feel, yet stands solidly on its own, a diminutive that has become a classic in itself. And because a Jack can be anything.
But which kind of anything would your Jack be? There are so many conceivable role models he might follow, good and not-quite-so-good. Here are some of the many possibilities, both real and fictional and how he might turn out if he followed their lead.